ALSO BY CAROL O’CONNELL
The Chalk Girl
Bone by Bone
Find Me
Winter House
Dead Famous
Crime School
Shell Game
The Judas Child
Stone Angel
Killing Critics
The Man Who Cast Two Shadows
Mallory’s Oracle
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Copyright © 2013 by Carol O’Connell
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
O’Connell, Carol, date.
It happens in the dark / Carol O’Connell.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-101-62318-3
1. Mallory, Kathleen (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Police—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 3. Policewomen—Fiction. 4. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3565.C497I83 2013 2013015334
813'.54—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
A PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY
I have a black-and-white photograph of four children on a beach in Paradise. That’s how they remembered years of their childhood in the tropics on the Isle of Pines, the setting for Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.
There are palm trees in the background, and the children wear swimsuits. Marion, grinning, perches on driftwood and cuddles her younger sister, Martha. Norman stands behind them, the oldest child, the serious one. In the foreground is little George, who tells terrible jokes, and yet he gets laughs.
A perfect day. Paradise in a snapshot.
Later, the family orange grove will be lost in a fire, and their father will work in a sugarcane factory to earn the passage money back to Boston. On the boat ride home, the children will lose all the Spanish words they knew. Still ahead of them is a global war, uniforms, guns and weddings, USO dances, jazz and jitterbug, an exciting time to be alive—so alive. An atomic bomb will fall, a mushroom cloud will bloom. Their families will grow through more wars, through an upheaval of technology and social revolution, more weddings, funerals, lots of christenings, as the four of them move through history, brothers and sisters.
One child on that beach in the photograph, Martha Olsen, died this past September. She was my aunt. She was the last. They are all gone.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND APOLOGIES TO REAL LIFE
Though downplayed in the book, Manhattan’s Midtown North police are so good they won a Tony Award for service to the Theater District. Also, the local unions would have you know that they protect their artists and artisans much better than I do, and union-card holders are rarely—in fact, never—murdered this way.
CONTENTS
Also by Carol O’Connell
Title Page
Copyright
A Photographic Memory
Acknowledgments and Apologies to Real Life
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
ROLLO: To cadge a line from Blake, “Sooner strangle an infant in its cradle than to nurse unacted desires.” (He turns to Susan) Oh . . . sorry. Did that make you nervous?
—The Brass Bed, Act I
The Theater District did not shut down for winter storms. East and west of the Great White Way, streets were electrified. Bright lights and the dazzle of animated signs hawked comedy and drama, dance and song. Up and down the sidewalks, ticket holders shielded their eyes with mittens and gloves to gawk at the gaudy marquees.
Peter Beck’s bare hands were jammed into his pockets, and, head bowed, he only saw the pavement. His scarf was a crusted band of ice, feeble protection from stinging snow, but it served to hide the playwright’s moving lips. His voice was low, and so there was no fair warning for passersby. If other pedestrians had seen his face, they might have found him odd, but, had they heard what he was saying, they would have given a wide berth to the mumbling man who was alternately angry and insanely sad.
The woolen cap was ripped from his scalp, and he turned back to watch it sail over a lamppost on the corner of Forty-ninth Street and Broadway. He raised one naked hand, and it was an effort to form his numb fingers into a fist. “Thieving wind!”
His other enemies were all theater folk.
He was done with crying, but the tears had not dried. They had frozen. Muttering, shivering, Peter walked past the theater’s main entrance, where he might well be told to wait in line. Farther down the sidewalk, he paused at the stage door, but decided against the humiliation of proving his worthiness to a rent-a-cop and perhaps being turned away if his name was not on the list of those who had made the cut.
When he had rounded a corner and then another to enter a blind alley, the wind was at his back, blowing him down the narrow lane of fire escapes and Dumpsters to a dead end at the rear door. And there was the damn security guard he had hoped to avoid. The stranger in the tri-cornered cap hunched beneath a glass-caged lightbulb, smoking a cigarette.
Would this man stop him? Oh, let him try.
As Peter reached for the doorknob, he knew there would be no challenge. He was invisible to the guard. At best, he was perceived as insignificant. And then there was that other word, the one used by women to neuter men—harmless.
Well, not tonight!
After the final curtain, the whole theater company, players to grunts, would bow to him on bended knee, wet their pants and crawl away.
Once he was inside, the alley door banged shut behind him, and Peter’s fingers, red as lobsters, fumbled with the buttons of his overcoat. As he made his way toward the broad scenery flats, the backstage lights flickered. Apparently, the glitches in the wiring were an ongoing thing. He looked up to see the young lighting tech, a tall stick with big feet, clambering down the catwalk ladder to stand with a pimple-faced stagehand in the wings. Neither of them gave so much as a nod to the sad man swaddled in wet, black wool.<
br />
Had he been stark naked, they would not have acknowledged him.
Snowflakes melted on Peter’s shoulders and his hatless, almost hairless head. Unwinding his scarf as he walked, he glanced at the blackboard on the wall behind the stage manager’s desk.
He stopped.
And his heart stopped—
For one beat—
Two beats.
New line changes were scrawled on the slate in white block letters. Opening night had come and gone, but the play was still evolving by an unseen hand, a chalk-wielding haunt, who gave new meaning to the word ghostwriter.
The playwright burped. A hiccup followed. The floor tilted and spun.
Hours ago, Peter Beck had left his apartment, dead drunk, and then lost both his gloves in two different bars twixt home and the theater. Listing to one side, he nearly toppled over when he heard the warning call, “Curtain in thirty minutes!” Threatening to pitch forward with every step, he lurched down a short flight of stairs to find his seat in the audience before—
The lobby doors opened wide, and people were coming down the aisles.
Peter found a place card on his reserved chair in the front row—but not front-row center. He had been shunted off toward a wall, brushed aside by a lackey’s seating arrangements. More cards appeared on three neighboring seats, and these were marked for the playwright’s guests, though he had invited no one.
Lacking the energy to shrug off his heavy coat, saving his strength for the final act, he sat down and fell asleep. Now and then, his watery eyes opened to catch snatches of the night. The front row was filled to his right. On his left side, the three complimentary seats remained empty, advertising that he was a man with no friends, certainly none among the cast and crew. He had missed the first performance, and not one of those bastards had thought to call and ask if he was well—or had he done them all the favor of a final exit, perhaps a long fall from some high window.
Rousing from lethargy for a slow turn of the head, he counted the house. According to the only critic in attendance last night, the play had opened to a sparse audience of twenty souls in a space built to hold more than a thousand—though not a bad turnout for foul weather, a theater with a blank marquee and a play with no advertising. Ah, but owing to that bizarre review in The Herald, tonight’s crowd had grown. At least seventy people had braved this second night of horizontal wind and snow. They formed a cluster in the center rows, and all of them had better views of the stage than he did.
The houselights dimmed. The curtains parted. Peter’s eyelids drooped and fell. Laughter woke him in fits as the first act was drawing to a close. He came fully awake to screams from the audience, cued by an actor’s swing of a baseball bat.
A bat? And when had that piece of business been added to the play?
The lights went out. All the lights. Curiously, even the red exit signs were turned off. Peter sweated in his thick wool coat and shifted his head to work out the crick in his neck, a quick slice of pain. His shirt collar was soaking wet, yet he felt oddly buoyant in his body, and his mind was floating elsewhere. The only sound was that of a small object striking the floor. And now, like the darkness, the silence was absolute.
When the stage lights came up, a woman seated on Peter’s right was the only one to scream this time, but she was not facing the stage. She was shrieking at him. He turned to her and gurgled a response as his chin nodded down to his chest.
• • •
Onstage, two actors transgressed when they stepped out of character and turned to the invisible fourth wall. Peering into the audience, they saw the bloodied corpse of the playwright slumped in a front-row seat, and one thespian said to the other, “Oh, crap. Not again.”
ROLLO: It’s locked. My brothers rarely open my window. They’re afraid the flies might get out.
—The Brass Bed, Act I
The man from Special Crimes Unit had all the props: the salt-and-pepper hair of seniority, a gold shield on display and hooded eyes that said to everyone he met tonight, I carry a gun. Don’t piss me off. Even so, he had to shoulder and shove his way through the mob in the lobby, where people from the audience were giving statements to uniformed officers. Regrettably, Detective Riker had tempered his drinking this evening, only two shots of booze at his niece’s wedding reception, and that was hardly enough to take the edge off a theatergoer’s elbow to his kidney.
A smaller man, half Riker’s age, followed close behind him, yelling to be heard above the fray, identifying himself as the theater company’s gopher. “I go for this, I go for that. Whatever ya need.” His more formal name was Bugsy, he said, “—’cause I gotta bug people to get stuff,” and then he added, “Detective Mallory’s already here. She beat the local cops.”
Of course she did. And the Upper West Sider had won that race with a forty-block handicap. Vehicular maniac. If only ambulances and fire trucks could match Mallory’s speed on the streets of Manhattan. Riker had no car of his own. Faced with an easy choice of drinking or driving, he had allowed his license to expire long ago. And so he had begged a ride back to the city with a fellow wedding guest, a slower motorist than his partner, one with regard for icy roads and human life.
The detective pushed through the lobby doors, and his vista widened with a jolt of space expanding, all tricked out in Technicolor. Halfway along the aisle of lush red carpet and beyond the overhang of the balcony, Riker looked up to a ceiling painted with dancers, high-kicking jazz babies weirdly blending with wall decorations of plastered-on Grecian urns. And scores of ornate sconces illuminated row upon row of red velvet chairs. Not a Broadway kind of cop, most of his theater experience came from Hollywood films, and now he was walking around inside an old movie made before he was born. Drop-dead glamorous was not a phrase he would say aloud, but here it was.
And there she was.
Framed by red curtains, his young partner, Kathy Mallory, stood at the center of the stage, motionless under a single unflattering light that made her seem flat like a cardboard cutout. But now other lights were trained on her, angling down from all sides to give the blond curls a weird halo effect, to sculpt a cat’s high cheekbones and round out her tall, slim body—bringing her to life.
Detective Riker had to smile.
Whoever was working the stage lights tonight, that guy was falling in love with Mallory.
A paunchy Midtown detective, Harry Deberman, stood beside her, waving his arms and ranting in shadow, clearly unloved by the lighting guy. And Mallory also ignored the man from the local copshop, though she was the interloper in this precinct.
Riker followed his guide to the end of the aisle. The gopher was quick, but not a sprinter, more of a scrambler. Years down the road, whenever the detective thought of this young man, he would forget the details of tangled sandy hair and blue eyes that were way too bright; he would always picture Bugsy with twitchy whiskers and a tail.
No need of directions to the corpse, the locus of the medical examiner’s team and a crew from Crime Scene Unit. The local cop from Midtown North came down from the stage to stand with this small crowd, to hitch up his pants and splay his hands and yell, “Hey, let’s get on with the show! Get to work here, guys!”
No one obeyed Harry Deberman. None of them moved, except to raise their eyes to Mallory, who stood in the authority of a spotlight, arms folded and so in charge of all that she surveyed. She could also win the vote for best dressed. That cashmere blazer was custom made, and even the designer jeans were tailored. Her dress code of money on the hoof said to everyone around her, Pay attention! And they did. Her audience below, those who dressed down to the pay grade of civil servants, awaited her okay to bag the body and process the crime scene—her crime scene.
On her partner’s account, Mallory had held up the removal of Peter Beck’s bloody corpse for a solid hour.
How sweet. How thoughtful.
Riker hunkered down before the front-row seat of the balding dead man, who might be in his forties, maybe younger.
The face had an unfinished look: hardly any lip, more like a pencil line for a mouth; and the nose was small, a kid’s nose that had failed to grow up with the man. The black woolen coat was open to expose a shirtfront soaked with the blood of a slit throat. On the floor at the victim’s feet was an old-fashioned straight-edged razor, and the corpse conveniently reeked of alcohol—liquid courage for the long, deep cut.
Well, how neat was that?
Detective Deberman bent down to Riker’s ear. “What’re you doin’ in my patch? Your partner won’t tell me squat.”
As yet, Riker had no idea why his unit had been called in, and so he shrugged. “I go where I’m kicked. I do what I’m told.”
Harry Deberman squatted on his haunches and pointed to the bloody weapon on the floor. “Odds are—that belonged to my stiff. The crew tells me this wimp used to brag about shavin’ with a cutthroat razor. I got this covered. . . . You can go now.”
The cut angled down from the victim’s right.
“You said you knew this man?” Riker looked up to catch a nod from Bugsy. “Was he left-handed?”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Deberman, answering for the gopher. “And the cut angle matches up with a lefty. Now take a whiff. Smell the booze? The guy had to get stinking drunk to do it. So you got no business here. Everything fits with a suicide.”
“Murder,” said Mallory in the tone of Boo!
The man from Midtown North jumped to his feet and spun around to face Riker’s partner. He had never heard her step down from the stage to steal up behind him. Given a sporting chance to see her coming, the long slants of her eyes also made people jumpy. They were electric green. If a machine had eyes—
Mallory glanced at the corpse. “Deberman took a loose key from the coat pocket. The right pocket of a left-handed man.” Turning on the local detective, she said, “You thought I wouldn’t notice that?”
“One key.” Riker snapped on latex gloves and probed underneath the corpse’s winter coat to reach the pants pockets, and there he felt a bulge with the hard edges of a key ring. In New York City, most house keys traveled in fives: a mailbox key, one for a building’s outer door, and three more for the deadbolts that secured the average apartment in this lock-down town. Now the loose key from the overcoat was more interesting. Riker stood up, held out one hand and said, “Gimme.”
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